Monday, January 14, 2013

"There is a class of people (in the South, among whom your author's kin were included), men women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order."Genral Sherman to Thomas Ewing (Order #11)

A curious pehnomenon occurs after and around every election in this country. Whether the Yankee Statist wins, loses or draws, he turns his attention to The South...to bitterly damn our existence or, rejoice in our immenent extiction.

"On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.

"If only it had been so." Andrew O'Hehir
Sorry about yer luck prick...but, we're still here and I'm raising one just like me. Of course, all I want, all he will want, all my fathers have wanted for generations is to be free of any and all connection with you....and your empire. We don't care how you live your life because we don't think about you...except to the extent that we are forced to continue in the political process of this ridiculous construct you call the United States. Sorry, Andy...as long as we have to be here we aren't just going to shut our mouths until you want to hear a story or a bit of song.

For Andy Southern culture isn't really a culture at all...it's just a corporate expression of racism and bigotry. What was actually done to the South was less than we deserved...

Look to the South and you who went with us through that land can best say if they have not been fearfully punished. Mourning is in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of their country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone, their system of labor annihilated and destroyed. Ruin and poverty and distress everywhere, and now pestilence adding to the very cap sheaf of their stack of misery.
Sherman

Take heart Andy, according to George Parker we are once again on the verge of extinction...but, beware

Northern liberals should not be too quick to cheer, though. At the end of “The Mind of the South,” Cash has this description of “the South at its best”: “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.” These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often calls on. The South’s vices—“violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas”—grow particularly acute during periods when it is marginalized and left behind. An estrangement between the South and the rest of the country would bring out the worst in both—dangerous insularity in the first, smug self-deception in the second.*
Again...as long as they smile and dance for you they're fine but, they are still under the delusion that they have some say in the affairs of the country.

Let me put this as clearly and as literally as I can (the only way to be understood among these, rootless, block headed, bell ends). We have tried to separate ourselves from you before and you responded by trying to exterminate Us. You failed. You have failed repeatedly. Why do you persist in this failed endevour when all we want is to be shed of you...and your absurd, greedy, warmonger, self-rightous, culturless, loud, obnoxious country?

*Interesting that the auther relies so heavily on Cash. If he had written "The Mind of India" rather than the "Southern Mind," Cash would already and rightly have been thrown on the trash heap of Orientilists but, because he wrote it for the U.S. Empire...he's still lauded.

If you doubt me read the contemporary critique of his work by Donald Davidson...where he rips Cash a brand new, two story, brick, two-car garage, asshole....decades before Edward Said picked up his first rock for the cameras.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

I know most of y'all don't care about football....but, I assume that everybody cares to some extent about justice. What happened yesterday during the South Carolina - Michigan game was an example of the Cosmic kind.

Without bogging down into minutia, a team has four downs (or tries) to move the ball ten yards. If they are successful...they get a new set of four downs. The ten yard distance that a team must move is kept by a chain with a pole on each end.

Look closely there...is that ball at the end of the chain? No it is not but, Michigan, on fourth down, was awarded a fresh set of downs based on that spot.

Bull S**T is the only way to describe it. Steve Spurrier went berserk...the announcer was flabbergasted, "nobody would call that a first down." For all the complaining that fans do about officiating, it's rare to have such a blatant example of incompetence or worse.

By all rights, signs, runes, tea leaves and flash polls....the ball belonged to South Carolina. What happened on the very next play shook the Universe and set it aright....

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Because of your avaristic obsession with the United States of America...you don't need me to tell you that President Obama told you yesterday what you already knew...America is Number ONE!

"No matter what the naysayers tell us, no matter how dark the other side tries to make things look, the fact is there is not another country on earth that would not gladly trade places with the United States of America.” Precious Leader.

"...[W]e’ve still got the best workers in the world. We’ve got the best entrepreneurs in the world. We’ve got the best scientists and researchers in the world, the best colleges,"...the best cheese, the best dirty bookstores and the cleanist interstate restrooms! Precious Leader.

SCOREBOARD CHUMPS!!!!

Sorry World to put your various histories, cultures and achievments into such a deep, dark, abysmal shadow but,...not that sorry.

Monday, July 2, 2012

The five day work week is often touted as one of labours great innovations. My response to that is who wants to work 40 hours a week? There's nothing liberating about being tied to a clock. Sometimes I work 50 hours a week...sometimes 30. Besides, who the hell makes any money working 40 hours a week...unless, of course, you can arbitrarily inflate your own wage.

Like most modern innovations the "weekend" is an empty promise...a fantasy. Liberties that are taken on Thursday aren't restored for the weekend. Petty annoyances don't take Saturday and Sunday off. People don't become better drivers at 5 on Friday...and you're far more likely to jump in the club pool with your iphone on a Sunday afternoon than you are on a Tuesday morning.

Nothin' 200 bucks can't fix.

All you need to know about Saturday is this...at one point, I had to get dressed. By my reckoning that's a huge fail.

Sunday was particularly irritating...the church was swarming with striped rags. There probably weren't that many surrounding Vicksburg during its destruction. I'm not saying there's no place for a kind of patriotism in the church but, what exactly are we supposed to be celebrating this July???? The destruction of Vicksburg, Friars Point, Meridian, Oxford, Greenwood, Jackson, etc...or maybe more recent events like the fruition of lincolnism and the final destruction of state sovereignty?

In a nave that is, de facto, C of E,..."My country tis of the...land of the pilgrims pride"...you mean the Church of England hating, smuggling, self-rightious pilgrims of new england?...Pound Sand. Despite the presence of people in Virginia for eons, despite the fact the, so called, Revolutionary War was financed through Charleston or that George Washington and Tom Jefferson were Southrons...these witch burners have convinced themselves that they invented the country. Of course, as it stands now...it is their invention and has been since 1865.

No rest at home either...there's an open house to get ready for. I've got 20 minutes of sweeping...roof, deck, drive...and 10 minutes worth of battery for the blower. All in 100 degree heat. I'm pretty sure the Boy saw me fling the blower arcross the yard. Sue me. I have a pathological hatred of mundane tasks...and surly tools.

The Boy was a big help....

"Pick up your toys Boy."

"No...I'm...Not..A...Boy...I'm...A...Bad...Robot" ...choppin the air with his hands as he's walkin' off into the kitchen. Passin' gas the whole time.

Martha was up to her elbows in toilets and had no patience for my dissertation on the inevitable dissapointment of machines...given the conflict between thier promise and what they can actually deliver. She didn't exactly tell me to shut up, but...I went ahead and got a broom, went back to my sweeping.

Eventually we get loaded up for the pool...where, of course, I dunked my phone.

No lounging in my pajamas lazily reading blogs and corrresponding with friends...no NCIS marathons or window shopping on Ebay or Abebooks...just a maddening kalidoscopic series of interlocking frustrations.

Thank goodness this weeks "holiday" falls on a Wed. I don't think I could've taken a third day off.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Yesterday on my way home from Meridian* I stopped at the Doolittle Cemetery in Newton, Mississippi.

There are over one hundred Confederate soldiers buried there. Most were sent to a hospital in the area from from the Siege at Vicksburg. About sixty of 'em are unknown. Like so many, they gave not only their lives but their existence to assert the independence of The South...to live free from what they rightly saw as an imperialistic United States increasingly dominated by rapacious industrialists.

Yet what do I find at Doolittle Cemetery yesterday?

This demented gesture again...the stripped rag!

I'm willing to concede that who ever You are...You at Doolittle, You at Okolona,...meant no harm. I'm sure, standin in line at Walmart with these tacky plastic flowers, you felt it was a magnanimous gesture you were making. We're all Americans now...these boys should be recognized as the great Americans they were, etc. Of course logically this could only mean that they were being forgiven...can you not see that?

They are in need of no forgiveness. What they deserve is respect for the sacrifice they made. Not only is this gesture highly disrespectful...it's disgusting. That flag has been slapped on every Southern thing that its representatives have deemed worthy of taking...from our towns to our music, our books, our food and our booze. These men were not Americans...like the blues, William Faulkner and Cokecola....they were of The South, they were Southroners, and they deserve to rest in peace as such.

It may come as a shock to You...but there are those, many of us direct heirs of these men, who don't give a fig about the U.S.A...U.S.A. Who don't see it as anything other than an imperial construct...a phony "nation." Without malice, we see no genuine ancestoral, cultural, or historical ties that give any meaning to the idea of a Nation that stretches from Main to Arizona...Michigan to Mississippi.

Whoever You are, if it's possible, think before You decide to do something like this again. In fact it's best you do think about it...twice.

Friday, April 27, 2012

After talkin' with the right people...it was clear that nobody knew who had done it or why.

There was some speculation that the VFW may have planted them on Memorial Day but, I doubt that. Of all people...certainly veterans would know better. Besides the only foreigners involved in the War were the invading yankees.

These boys gave their lives, their very identity, but there's one sacred thing they took to their anonymous graves...they died citizens of a free and independent Dixie. It should be obvious to anyone, with a cat's ability to empathize...no matter how they feel about the conquest of The South, the Confederacy, and on...that this was a bad gesture.

I have a theory...and I reckon it's as good as any other.

Yesterday mornin' I left Tupelo and headed up to Brice's Crossroads near Baldwyn.

On June 10, 1864, there was a pretty serious scrap there. The place may not come immediately to mind when thinking of the War...the way Gettysburg or Vicksburg might. Two reasons for that...one, in the overall picture of the war...there was no strategic gain for the victors. Secondly, and more to the point the invaders got their asssssses kicked at Brice's Crossroads by Nathan Bedford Forrest.*

The yankees had a 3 to 1 advantage in numbers but...Forrest was a Jedi. He back-flipped into the middle of those bitches and scattered 'em like quail..or, maintaining the simile, like those fruity robots in the bad Star Wars movies. He took 1,500 hundred prisoners there...the rest ran in a panic back to Memphis.

It was so bad that there's a special "Rationalizing the Defeat" section on the Wikipedia page. The locals were uncooperative and it was really hot...ha.

No victory comes without sacrifice...

These graves have not been molested by anything other than the restless soil in that part of the state.

Unknown markers are moving...but a spot like this has its own profound sense. You can read the names...Bean, Stuart, McMorris, Jones, Davis, Harper, Spencer, Barham...they've all got the same date, June 10, 1864.

I left the cemetery and headed toward Baldwyn. There's a visitors center and museum there. I was hoping to find some flags that would be more "appropriate" for the cemetery in Okolona.**

I was greeted by a tiny old lady with a kinda chirpy Southern accent that was beginning to creak a little bit under the weight of decades. She asked where I was from....I found what I was lookin' for. As I was diggin' in my wallet to pay I heard the question again...

"Whur yeeeh frome suurh?"

It was a round fella...transparent coloured, sorta featureless really. It was obvious he weren't from around here...

"Shuh-Kaaago, Ill-annoy."

A tourist...there's lots of 'em...thousands of 'em. Understandably I reckon, many people in America are almost obsessively fascinated with the War. This fella's people might not have been on this continent in the 19th century...but the subject draws all types of folks from everywhere in the US like a magnet.

Maybe it was one of these tourists...a misguided fella, from a place where empathy isn't known to be a natural characteristic, from a place that never doubts itself,...maybe this was a magnanimous gesture on their part. To show there was no hard feelings.

Gee thanks.

I don't know...at any rate...it's fixed.

*On the off chance that any of you would...don't start on Forrest here...please. I don't ask very often but, we can have that discussion on another thread.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

I come through Okolona, on my way up, like I always do and stopped at the cemetery.

You can see there was the usual arson...though it was explained to me recently by an apologist for the empire that hospitals, evne those abandoned by the military one would have to assume, were legitimate military targets.

Considering the size of it, and that it holds soldiers from all over the South...it's not looked after like it oughta be.

More than likely there are soldiers from my ggGrandaddy Garbett's unit. They ended up in north Mississippi before heading on to the Carolinas. Southroners from Texas to South Carolina have people buried there...many of them unknown.

It's these fellas that got my attention today because for some unfathomable reason...some misguided, or worse, soul has placed U.S. imperial flags on the graves of many of these unknown soldiers.

Unless this was a deliberately malicious act...and who knows...I can't begin to comprehend the thought process. They gave their lives and their identity...leave them their dignity!

I was so beside myself I did something that I still feel gross about...I registered a complaint. I emailed the head of the Mississippi Sons of Confederate Veterans to inquire if they had any idea what the....was going on at the Okolona Cemetery.

Hopefully I'll hear something between now and Thursday because if I don't...them flags wont be there on Friday.

I got lots of things to write about y'all. My Daddy's been up and I been with him. This was not on my agenda.

One of the things that's gone without mention around here that shouldn't have was the passing of Levon Helm...from just over the river in Arkansas. At the risk of appearing overly dramatic...this seems like as good a moment as any to fix that.

*

*Worth noting I think that it was Robbie Robertson,a Canadian...with the help of Levon in getting the story right...that wrote this beautiful and utterly respectful song.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Sometimes I get a hankerin' for Mackdonald's Big Breakfast...pancakes, sausage, biscuit. It's good but, I'm always partial to the vacuous smell of clean when I'm putting things in my stomach.

That limits my options 'cause I wouldn't feel comfortable chewin' bubblegum in half of 'em that I walk into...and right back out of. Sadly, I've run up and down these roads so much that I know which ones are clean enough to eat in.

In Ocean Springs that'd be the one on 90...next to the Sonic...in front of the Walmart. It's new...the manager brings potted plants from home...and it has no unexpected, inexplicable odors.

Unfortunately, what it does have is five or six geriatric yankees that meet every morning to drink coffee and berate one another.

No statement goes unchallenged...

"If I was ganna travel...I'd fly into Ackapukuh*...

"NO...not Ackapukuh."

No? If he, with a desire to fly into Acapulco, sat down to make his own travel arrangements...he would not decide to fly into Acapulco? Really?

Their favorite subject is old age benefits...

"Ya ahtamaticaly quaalify fa that..."

"I didn't. They said I hada sign up fa it."

"Sambady lied to ya."

"'m nat ganna ahgu wit ya abat it.**"

Ha.

All I can say is they must love it...just a peculiar form of amusement for 'em I reckon. I've never been in here when they weren't at it.

Maybe I shouldn't be so hung up on stink.

* pronounced Ahhhhhhh-caaah-po-cooo in Mississippi.

**I have spared the reader here by not giving a more accurate description of the sound by making every sentence one word.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Reckon there's one for the Carolina's and Mississippi too? Surely there are similar souvenirs from their Great Plains Tour.

Gotta be more memorabilia...copies of Love Letters taken out of Southern homes and printed in northern newspapers for amusement, wood from Southern homes in mini charcoal bags, blood stained undergarments?